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Title: They Drown Our Daughters by Katrina Monroe
Details: Copyright 2022, Sourcebooks
Synopsis (By Way of Back Cover): "IF YOU CAN HEAR THE CALL OF THE WATER, IT'S ALREADY FAR TOO LATE.
They say Cape Disappointment is haunted. That's why tourists used to flock there in droves. They'd visit the rocky shoreline under the old lighthouse's watchful eye and fish shells from the water as they pretended to spot dark shapes in the surf. Now the tourists are long gone, and when Meredith Strand and her young daughter return to Meredith's childhood home after an acrimonious split from her wife, the Cape seems more haunted by regret than any malevolent force.
But her mother, suffering from early stages of Alzheimer's, is convinced the ghost stories are real. Not only is there something in the water, but it's watching them. Waiting for them. Reaching out to Meredith's daughter the way it has to every woman in their line for generations—and if Meredith isn't careful, all three women, bound by blood and heartbreak, will be lost one by one to the ocean's mournful call.
Part modern gothic, part ghost story, They Drown Our Daughters explores the depths of motherhood, identity, and the lengths a woman will go to hold on to both."
Why I Wanted to Read It: The past two years have been big ones for books about Witches of all kinds. This year is no different, and this claimed to be a Witch book.
How I Liked It: CAUTION! SPOILERS! If you look into any comment section online, you'll notice something. No, it isn't the fact the earth can only be cleansed with fire (although good guess!), I'm talking about the fact that when you see a bunch of people commenting about something they've just seen (an article, a post, a video, a book review), people interpret media differently. Someone may notice something you missed or offer insight (or unfortunately, depending on the platform, trolling and hate speech that will go completely unchecked-- the algorithm sucks and is designed to suck at this), someone may just as likely be unable to focus on anything other than a random aspect of whatever is being commented upon. So what does that have to do with this book? Let's find out!
But first! We open in the 1880s (and if you miss the note at the top of the chapter that it's 1881, little in the text tells you that; more on that later) and an unfortunate incident that befalls a woman, Regina, who has consulted a witch friend of hers about her cheating husband. As she's planting a charm in his office in the night, she's discovered by her visiting young niece who has heard stories about her uncle's wife's friendship with a witch and can't wait to tell everyone all about what she saw (and for some reason voices this intent). A struggle ensues and the girl has a (sort of unlikely/miraculously unlucky?) accidental death by falling down the stairs. After hiding the body in the early morning, the woman's children, including her favorite, her eldest daughter Marina, have discovered something is up and Marina is gone, presumably to investigate. Marina is nowhere to be found and the woman realizes she must've gone to the water that surrounds their property, the unfortunately named Cape Disappointment.
Jump forward to the present (presumably the time of publication of the novel, the 2020s) and Meredith Strand is fleeing an unhappy marriage with their daughter, Alice. Leaving her wife back home, she flees to the only place she knows and where she herself fled from years earlier, Cape Disappointment, where her mother Judith is struggling with the early stages of Alzheimer's and the fact the two have never had a good relationship.
Ominous happenings in the town with a mysterious redheaded girl that keeps turning up, a distinctive shell that also keeps creepily turning up no matter how many times it's thrown away/thrown back make for a complicated situation as it is, added to when Judith goes missing by the water (and they just straight up declare her dead and hold a funeral and everything, in less than a week or so).
If that wasn't enough, the narrative keeps shifting focus to earlier generations, counting down generations from Regina to her descendant Meredith. Turns out each generation loses at least one person to the waters mysteriously. A murdering ghost? A sea monster? The longest storyline of the backstory is reserved for a teenage Judith (Meredith's mother), navigating the mysteries of Cape Disappointment.
In the present, things are getting more chaotic. Meredith is discovering family secrets while cleaning out her mother's things (seriously? MISSING LESS THAN A MONTH AND SHE HAS ALZHEIMER'S MEANING SHE MIGHT HAVE WANDERED SOME PLACE BY ACCIDENT AND STILL BE VERY MUCH ALIVE) and is served with divorce (she leaves a voice mail cursing at her now-ex wife) and seeks comfort in an aborted assignation with a woman after getting nearly black-out drunk at the town's bar. That's all it takes for her daughter to be kidnapped and her babysitter, her mother's cousin and friend of the family, to get beaten up by whoever took the girl.
Meredith and teenage Judith chase answers in their respective but concurrent storylines and an extremely improbable solution is reached about exactly what is taking people each generation. After an extremely weird and unsatisfying struggle, Meredith is able to save her daughter and confront the perpetrators firsthand, and while I'm not giving all the spoilers away, I'll tell you that it involves petty criminals, cults, people who are still alive somehow after over a hundred and thirty years but don't really show it and aren't ghosts, actual ghosts, and a whole, whole lot of dangling threads and mass suspension of disbelief.
Back to their normal lives, it turns out it isn't a happy ending, as the water takes one last (at least, for now) life . Jump forward twenty-five years into the future and we meet Meredith's daughter Alice, all grown up, with children of her own, enjoying a day at the water and it's suggested the curse has been satisfied (again, for now). Family trees helpfully frame the book.
In case you couldn't tell by my recap, I didn't care for this book. The pacing was slow, the historical aspects were lazy and most of the time didn't add anything other than dutifully checking off a death (and there are far more entertaining ways to do that), and the grand culmination made no sense and wasn't actually grand at all, just tedious and ridiculous.
Look, I don't mind ghosts. I even like them! I don't mind suspension of disbelief, especially when it comes to fantasy. Mary Downing Hahn has churned out a shocking amount of these sorts of books, exceptionally well-written and engaging and far scarier than this book, and they're written for children.
As to what Witches this supposed witch book is portraying, sort of the general magic-maker, folktale kind. Witches offer charms for cheating husbands and protection spells, and there are herbs rumored to be good for this or that, much like real life.
This whole thing desperately needed a far better editor and much finessing. This had more loose threads than a well-worn-and-washed cheap sweater and despite what should've been nail-biting action and suspense, it was a slog through and through.
So this is a pretty formulaic slog of a book. What does that have to with comment sections and what people get from media?
Well, here's something you may have noticed, or maybe not, because it's just there and I tried to communicate it that way in the summary: Meredith has a wife. She also references a girlfriend growing up, and dallies with the woman at the bar. One of the most fascinating things I found about this is probably one of the most controversial: Meredith's Queerness is treated as nothing remarkable whatsoever. Her problems with her mother do not stem from it, the bullying and harassment she faced from the town based on her family's association with Cape Disappointment never includes homophobia, when picking up the woman in the bar and planning to have sex by the water, neither express any fear at meeting homophobic harassment, and in fact, no one even mentions anything about it at all. You could easily switch out Meredith's former girlfriend, current ex-wife, and drunken dalliance with a woman to a former boyfriend, current ex-husband, and drunken dalliance with a man and it wouldn't make the slightest difference in the text whatsoever.
The Queer community is somewhat divided on the whole "just like everyone else" route. For one thing, being treated as the Other for so long has, well, Othered us. For another, even in our supposedly enlightened present, Queer people are facing horrific attacks from all angles. But is it our oppression that defines us as Queer? Does every Queer story need to depict homophobia? Can't we just have Queer joy in fiction, since we can't seem to get any peace in real life? All of these are valid points, of course. But where matters become complicated is when it feels like we're being used to check a box and other ways when it feels like the representation is performative, rather than genuine (looking at you, Neil Gaiman, and talking out of every side of your mouth you have about Good Omens). But here's the thing. This book has a Queer author. Which sort of puts a different spin on the fact the book could be made "straight" literally just by altering pronouns here and there.
So we have a book that's a formulaic slog of overused tropes, but with a Queer main character treated matter-of-factly, albeit a bit... woodenly. There's a death of a Queer character at the end of the book and this book doesn't really have that many to spare (only four: Meredith, her ex wife, the unnamed past girlfriend, and the nameless bar hook-up), but given the nature of these types of books, I'm not quite ready to call it the Bury Your Gays trope. And certainly now more than ever, isn't that at least... something? That even a not-greatly written Queer character in a not-greatly written book can be a Thing and it's not a big deal? Maybe.
At least, that's what I'm choosing to take from this media.
Notable:
It didn't matter how much of her own blood and sweat had been mixed into the mortar that held the lighthouse together, that it was her who made sure it was lit at night to guide sailors safely home. (pgs 4 and 5)
I actually flinched at "it was her" when it should have been "it was she". I really wonder at the level of proofreading and editing that's available now.
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Meredith and her mother could never be in the same room for more than a few minutes without biting each other's heads off. Her stepdad tried to tell her it was because they were alike; Meredith figured it was because her mother hated her. (pg 26)
HELPFUL PRO-TIP FOR ARGUMENTS: Even if on the odd chance it's true, never tell people fighting that they do it because they're so much alike. This isn't really a note about the text, just a note in general.
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As I mentioned before, unfortunately the book is as indifferent to historical eras as it is to Queerness. Really the only commitment to era is Vietnam playing a prominent storyline as Meredith's uncle is drafted and then MIA (leading Judith to seek otherworldly means of trying to secure her brother's safety). For the most part, language, social customs, and other details are fairly interchangeable throughout over one hundred and thirty-some years of history.
Thought the days of burning a witch at the stake were long over, it would only take a word from her husband to get Regina locked in a sanitarium forever. (pg 6)
While I appreciate that the book isn't going the whole weird literal witch hunts were somehow a thing that still existed long after they absolutely did not historical trope, and trying to portray the 1880s like the 1680s, if we could put the "burned at the stake" thing down, particularly in stories that take place in the United States or England where accused witches were never burned at the stake but hanged (and in one case, pressed to death with rocks), that would be such an improvement in witch stories and in general.
Beth whimpered. "Mom? What's happening? Who's out there?" (pg 61)
Far more likely in 1910 for a child to say "Mother" or "Ma" or "Mama", not "Mom". This is such an easy fix to help the text.
In 1975, Judith tracks down the home of a friend she meets and shows up much to the friend's displeasure.
"This is borderline stalker behavior. You see that, right?" She shook her head. (pg 230)
In 1975, that line from a teenager would be highly unlikely, particularly based on common knowledge of stalkers at the time.
Final Grade: D
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